“This is an effort I believe to appeal to a kind of anger in people,” Frank, a Newton Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, today told a Boston foreclosure-prevention forum.

Frank charged that conservatives aim to shift blame for the market meltdown away from Wall Street and toward minority-lending laws like the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

Um, Barney, if you bothered to read the conservative stuff, you’d find they’re looking at more than just the Community Reinvestment Act. It’s not they, but you who are trying to shift the blame.

What is it with liberals? Instead of taking responsibility for their own messes (or, in the case, their own involvement in a mess which had many authors) and blame others.

Unable to acknowledge conservative arguments, Barney Frank has decided that Republicans harbor racist sentiments. I guess he just borrowed a page from the liberal playbook.

He’d rather level false and absurd charges against conservatives than accept his responsibility. Once again, let me repeat, in the interest of recovering from this financial mess with plunging further into recession, Barney Frank should resign from the House Financial Services Committee.

The CRA was only a small part of the cause of the collapse. It affected loans only at the margins. The Clinton administration opted for more aggressive enforcement, and â€œcommunity organizersâ€ like ACORN used that to file nuisance complaints that could keep banks from merging and acquiring other banks. That may have pushed lenders into lowering standards on a handful of loans, but only to enough of an extent to avoid government sanctions.

In that sense, the CRA is a bit of a red herring. The real cause of the collapse was the Congressional push for Fannie and Freddie to support subprime lending by purchasing the paper from lenders, which is related to the same policies that generated the CRA but isn’t the CRA itself. Lenders make money one of two ways: keeping the paper themselves and getting the interest over the term of the loan, or selling the paper to someone else for a guaranteed short-term profit. When Fannie and Freddie began buying all of this paper, they created a huge demand for subprime loans â€” and lenders responded by offering easy money to almost anyone who applied. They threw out income requirements and equity thresholds (such as down payments) and generated tremendous short-term profits for themselves â€¦ while Fannie and Freddie assumed all the long-term risk.

Precisely because he is worried about losing his job. The man shouldnt just resign his chairmanship, or from the committee, he is largely responsible for one of the greatest financial diasters in American history, the entire world economy in crisis — he should resign from congress. Enron was a kerfuffle compared to this. We already know his involvement has been unethical, is it possible that he has also done something illegal on top of just monumentally, earth-shatteringly stupid and corrupt? Id say yes. Im looking forward to the FBI report, and Im not saying it will happen, but I wouldnt be surprised if Frank winds up in jail. Nor would I be disappointed.

Does Barney Frank have some data on the the profile of the typical sucker with a Fannie/Freddie subprime loan who has either bolted or is in foreclosure?

It would seem that playing the race card requires a presumption that most of the “victims” are…….well……what? Does Barney Frank use the logic that since he and his “affordable housing” pals legislated Fannie/Freddie to serve a specific group of risky borrowers, that it must be that same group that is defaulting.

So, if there is a race element, what are the root causes? Barney and his “affordable housing” pals, it would seem. (I have lived in the same “affordable housing” since 1972. I am surrounded by housing I can not afford. I know many people who could not afford my house. However, they have found “affordable housing” of their own. For some, a doublewide is not “affordable housing.” Get the picture?)

Good point, heliotrope. How IS it that Barney knows that everyone who got “affordable housing” is of a particular skin color? Is it because he and his fellow “affordable housing” folks were supporting and passing rules that denied said loans to white people?

[…] They don’t want to investigate Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac because they might upset their narrative about how deregulation and Wall Street greed prompted the mortgage meltdown.Â So, when conservative suggest that government programs might have precipitated the mess, a leading Democrat accuses such heretics to the media narrative of racism. […]

[…] Services Committee, for his responsibility for the mortgage meltdown (here, here, here, here and here), he at least acknowledged the need for regulation of the government-supported enterprises (GSEs) […]

[…] he can, the unhappy Barney Frank attacks his political adversaries, accusing them of blaming black people, hating gays and having psychological disorders. But, so used is this career politician to fawning […]